• Water Engineering Research
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.49-61
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• 2000

Magnitude-frequency relationships are used in the design of dams, highway bridges, culverts, water supply systems, and flood control structures. In this paper, possible techniques for analyzing flood frequency at a site are presented. A currently used approach to flood frequency analysis is based on the concept of parametric statistical inference. In this analysis, the assumption is make that the distribution function describing flood data in known. However, such an assumption is not always justified. Even though many people have shown that the nonparametric method provides a better fit to the data than the parometric method and gives more reliable flood estimates. the noparpmetric method implies a small probability in extrapolation beyond the highest observed data in the sample. Therefore, a remedy is presented in this paper by introducing an estimator which mixes parametric and nonparametric density estimate.